Holiday Blues

Holidays in Greece: Chilling out in the sun, spending time with the family, having some rest and much free time. Time to think about my job, my life and the whole universe ;-) However too much thinking makes me sad...

It has been more than half a year now that I have left Herold for good. In the end work there got quite boring and some things really sucked. But after staying there for five years the development team became my family. My bond with my colleagues kept me from leaving earlier and made it a really hard decision when the time for something new had finally come. I still remember them and from time to time I suffer moments of painful memories. I do not know how it came to be like that. There were no activities together, no common hobbies to talk about, even no geek interests to compete in. We did not meet after work or go out for a beer together, at least not more than once or twice a year.

Nevertheless I am thinking of them: Alex making his acrid remarks; Andreas refreshing me with new ideas, that always seemed to be much too revolutionary; Anton, although we hardly talked to each other; Ben making us play network games after work; Claudia my "soul-sister"; Claudio, exchanging stories about our misbehaving sons during lunch break; Dominik, always calm and relaxed; Martina having much too much energy; Petra; Richard testing a new database tool each week; Ronnie; Sylvi; Tim making me laugh about all his carpenter jokes; and Vero, the caring soul of the team, although she could really be mean sometimes.

My dear colleagues I miss you.

backwater, in-house development

Maybe I am too strict, or my expectations are far too high for the average company (which is likely the case). However, while staying with Herold I reached the conclusion that "backwater, in-house development" does not provide footing for IT innovation. Obviously this is true but the ironic part is, that management pretends that it's there. Listen to this:

Two years ago they came up with the idea of science Fridays. Every Friday the development department would be locked, so no one would disturb us and all developers would try out new stuff or study books. Well, it never happened. Last year the idea was still around, we would just start after this particular next release. And there is always some pressing next release to work on. The WTF of this paragraph is that two months ago I was asked by the boss of my boss if I used the science Friday time for some project. I had to laugh out loud.

Another idea was born at the beginning of last year: every month a member of the team would prepare some topic, e.g. new features in .NET 3, and present an overview. There was not a single one of these presentations, the monthly meetings were always full with lists of features to be put into the next release. The proposed topics, already outdated, are still in my boss' drawer, waiting for their time.

How about professional training? "Sorry, there is no budget for that. Sales revenue just increased by 5 percent last year. The company is in critical condition. We all have to work harder."

So I experiment with new technologies at home and try to bring in something new from time to time. But I was told that we do not need it, because we are no IT company and there is no point in spending time to stay up to date because it is not our main business. And anyway I am not supposed to spend "so" much work time on education and research. But I have to, because as Heinz Kabutz once said, we're in an industry with a knowledge half-life of at most 18 months. Keep in mind that half of what you knew 18 months ago is worthless today, so you need to keep learning new things.

Do you work under similar conditions? Tell me how you overcome them to stay a top notch developer.

My Rants

After years of being a maintenance developer I am pissed off. During maintenance the software systems are always messed up. Obviously the release date of the next batch or upgrade is set by the business analysts long before the exact extend of work is known. There is never time to fix anything. In my early days I would have argued with managers to add extra time for fixing the most ugly things during the next release, but finally I resigned from wasting my energies.

The Angry Developer
So I became an angry developer. Always in pain, I am using biting comments to point at serious problems in systems, processes and whole organisation. I will rant from time to time about IT work and software development related stuff.

For any legal departments reading this: The events and companies I am posting about are completely fictional and any resemblance to any real people or companies that may or may not exist is purely coincidental.